Saturday, January 19, 2008

The question has already been broached. And it has led to a session called 'When Robots Commit War Crimes: Autonomous Weapons and Human Responsibility,' at Stanford University's Technology in Wartime conference. The io9 blog -- whose blogger is also an organizer of the conference -- describes the question like this:

Now that the military is using autonomous surveillance/combat robots created by iRobot, the company behind the Roomba robot vacuum, a strange question emerges: What do we do if a robot commits a war crime? This isn't idle speculation. An automated anti-aircraft cannon's friendly fire killed nine soldiers in South Africa last year, and computer scientists speculate that as more weapons (and aircraft) are robot-controlled that we'll need to develop new definitions of war crimes. In fact, the possibility of robot war crimes is the subject of a panel at an upcoming conference at Stanford.

If the military keeps moving forward at its current rapid pace towards the deployment of intelligent autonomous robots, we must ensure that these systems be deployed ethically, in a manner consistent with standing protocols and other ethical constraints that draw from cultural relativism (our own society’s or the world’s ethical perspectives), deontology (right-based approaches), or within other related ethical frameworks.